ABSTRACT
The systematic punishments are ideological in the same way as the series of Edward’s torments in Marlowe’s play. Alan Bray suggests that in the minds of men who had sex with other men there may have been a mental gap between this idea of sodomy as heinous and the actual sexual acts which they enjoyed, a gap which prevented their sexual actions being identified by themselves as sodomy. A play representing obliquely an episode of King James’s life would be of immediate interest to an English audience whose monarch he was likely to become. The focus of interest for this essay, however, is not to identify any precise historical similarities, but rather to analyse the different discourses in which the Lennox affair came to be represented. Religious subversion and political ambition are imagined as happening under cover of Lennox’s gradually coming to dominate and direct, with the King’s compliance and pleasure, his affections and possibly his very body.
